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This paper presents a dual-band RF rectifying circuit for wireless power transmission at 1.17 GHz and 2.4 GHz. A dual-band harmonic-tuned inverse-class F/class-F mode power amplifier using a 10 W GaN device has been utilized to implement the proposed rectifier with an on-board coupler and phase shifter. The matching circuit is precisely designed so that the circuit operates in inverse class F and class F mode in the lower and upper frequency bands using dual-band harmonic tuning, respectively. Measurement results show that the rectifier circuit has 78% and 76% efficiencies at 1.17 GHz and 2.4 GHz frequency bands, respectively. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this rectifier is the first demonstration of a dual-band harmonic-tuned synchronous rectifier using a GaN HEMT device with an integrated coupler and phase-shifter for a watt-level RF input power.
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Active Class-C LC Phase Shifter with Automatic Amplitude Control
This paper introduces an automatic amplitude control (AAC) mechanism implemented on a class-C LC-based phase shifter. The AAC technique compensates for the amplitude attenuation of the phase shifter as a function of frequency and provides output swing control that enhances the suitability as a phase shifter in the auxiliary path of a load-modulated balanced power amplifier (LMB-PA). It can be utilized to calibrate and fine-tune the power amplifier (PA) performance after fabrication to achieve optimal performance. The circuit is designed and laid out using 22−nm FD-SOI process technology. To demonstrate the proposed idea, the frequency of operation was chosen as 2.4 GHz. The total power consumption varies between 0.52 − 1 mW due to phase control from 0 − 120◦ with 0.085 dB amplitude error.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2314813
- PAR ID:
- 10519351
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE (Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE NEWCAS Conference)
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Waleed Khalil (Ed.)The increasing performance demanded by emerging wireless communication standards motivates the development of various techniques devoted to improving the efficiency of power amplifiers (PA) because this is one of the most power-demanding blocks in RF transceivers. Power-amplifier efficiency is proportional to the ratio of the average voltage delivered by the PA to the voltage level of the PA's power supply. Efficiency is affected by the peak-to-average ratio of the transmitted signal. The envelope tracking modulator maximizes this ratio, correlating the PA's power supply with the envelope of its output signal. Efficient modulators must satisfy certain critical conditions: i) it must be very agile to track the amplitude variations of PA's output voltage; ii) it must reduce the timing mismatch between the PA modulator's supply and PA output waveform envelope to optimize power efficiency and avoid PA saturation, and iii) the envelope tracking modulator must be highly power efficient. This paper reviews several relevant envelope tracking techniques. Hybrid modulators consisting of switching regulators and linear amplifiers have become mainstream envelope tracking systems for wideband applications, in which linear amplifiers complement the functionality of highly efficient but narrow bandwidth switching modulators. Replacements for linear amplifiers include a combination of power-efficient ADC and DACs that provide very agile feedback, increasing the system's slew rate, which allows the modulator to track faster envelope signals. Multi-level switching is another relevant approach utilizing multiple switching voltages to reduce current ripples and enable the use of wider bandwidth switching regulators with high power efficiency. The use of multiple inductors is another interesting approach. Multi-phase switching techniques utilize multiple switching stages in a time-interleaved manner to extend the switching modulator's bandwidth. A slow buck converter can be combined with a fast buck converter and optimized for different switching frequencies; this architecture covers the signal envelope's low- and high-frequency components. The approaches mentioned use switching modulators with analog feedback controllers (Pulse-width modulation [PWM] or hysteretic). However, an alternative approach is prediction-based digital feedforward control. This tutorial discusses all of these approaches.more » « less
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